


excelsior

by allapologies



Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Avengers - Freeform, Avengers!AU, BlackWidow!Lydia, CaptainAmerica!Scott, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Hawkeye!Allison, Hulk!Derek, Ironman!Stiles, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, Superheroes, Superheroes!AU, marvel AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 16:25:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1824817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allapologies/pseuds/allapologies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is a genius billionaire philanthropist, and Derek has breathtaking anger management issues. Mostly, they argue and flirt. But sometimes, they save the world.  </p><p>Avengers AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	excelsior

**Author's Note:**

> Season 3 characters/concepts/plot developments not featured because the author has not seen season 3.  
> Characters and stuff belong to Disney, Marvel, MTV, whatever.

 

Nurse Melissa McCall drops the last empty syringe on the metal tray. “I’m getting real tired of seeing you boys in here,” she says. She’s spattered with blood up to her elbows.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Scott says, looking contrite.

“Thanks, _mom_ ,” Stiles says. Nurse McCall rolls her eyes. Scott pats her on the shoulder, silently apologizing for Stiles.

A buzzer goes off. “Dammit.” She pulls her gloves off with her teeth and tosses them in the bin before rushing out of the ward.

When she’s gone, Scott turns to give Stiles a look.

“What?” Stiles asks. He pushes the tray back and forth with his fingertip, making the syringes rattle. “You treat her like she’s your mother.”

“Actually,” Scott says, “she’s technically my great grand-niece.” He frowns.

“Weird,” Stiles says. He wrinkles his nose and he instantly regrets it. The scab forming over his eyebrow cracks. Fresh blood dribbles into his eye.

“Weird,” Scott agrees, grabbing Stiles’ chin and dabbing at his eye with a tissue. “You know,” he says hesitantly, still wiping at the blood but not exactly looking at Stiles. “Her job might be easier if-you know, if maybe you stopped running off on your own. Or if you at least told the rest of the team before you did things.”

Stiles inhales deeply.

“Are you guys gonna make out now?”

Stiles jerks out of Scott’s reach and nearly falls out of his seat. SHIELD agent Erica Reyes leans up against the doorframe. Her bright red lips curl into a smirk.

“Sorry to take away your show, Agent,” Scott says.

“Do you have an age gap fetish?” Stiles asks her. He’s only half joking. “Why do you wanna watch me make out with a guy older than your grandpa so badly?”

“If you wanna get technical, the Captain is what? Twenty? Twenty-two?” Erica turns to Scott expectantly.

“I was twenty-five before I got iced under.”

“Yeah, and that was during World War II. So he’s still ninety.” Stiles rolls his eyes. “Don’t you have better places to be, Reyes? Aliens to dissect, foreign governments to undermine, surveillance protection acts to violate, whatever?”

Her smile grows wide and slightly predatory. “That’s Boyd’s job. I’m here to take you to Budget and Management to meet with both Argents.”

“Why?” Scott asks.

“Not you, Captain. Just Stilinski.”

“Why not me?”

“You’re not the one who leveled a parking garage.”

Stiles’ skin prickles in irritation. “You know what, that is totally unfair,” he says, pointing at her. “You sociopaths are making me pay for expenses incurred doing your own dirty work. If I was working at an above-ground agency, I could be pulling real contractor fees.”

“Cry harder, Stilinski.” Agent Isaac Lahey slinks into the ward and stations himself next to Erica. “What the hell do you need more money for, anyway?” The fluorescent lights glint off his aviator frames.

“Nice shades, asshole,” Stiles says, ignoring the question. “What is this, a Tarantino movie?”

Isaac crosses his arms, closing in on himself like sleeping grass. Scott gives Stiles a light kick to the shin.

“Really, though.” Erica frowns. “What does an eighteen-year-old do with the profits of a Fortune-500 company?”

“He invests it in technology that SHIELD tries to appropriate,” Stiles fires back. “And Stilinski Industries is Fortune-2, thanks.”

“So who’s number one?” Scott asks, innocent as ever.

Stiles pinches his nose. “Wal-Mart,” he admits.

Isaac lets out a short bark of laughter. Stiles glares at him.

“Come on, number two.” Erica latches on to his right elbow. “Face the music.”

“Aw-fuck, no, that’s the bruised one,” Stiles complains. “You know, I have important things to do. Science things. I blew out a repulsor, being your human meat shield.”

Isaac grabs his other elbow. “You can lodge your complaints with Budget and Management.”

They frog march down the hall and into the inner circle of hell. Scott waves at him as they go.

When Stiles looks back, Scott is framed in the ward’s window. A concerned frown folds his normally open face.

 

* * *

 

 Agent Vernon Boyd waits outside the conference room. Stiles notes with delighted interest the way that Erica’s acid smirk softens into something a little smaller and sweeter when she greets Boyd, and the way that their handshake lasts a second or two longer than strictly necessary.

Stiles will use this, someday.

He is disappointed when Isaac and Erica hand him off to Boyd and leave. Disappointed because Agent Boyd is quiet, intelligent, and exceedingly competent at his job, so Stiles likely won’t get the chance to do anything remotely entertaining.

“You should come by the tower sometime,” Stiles says. He runs his finger over the edge of his bandages. “Training rooms, laboratory tech, advanced weaponry. Your kind of scene.”

“Mmhmm.” Boyd stares at the door in front of him.

“Erica is over all the time,” he adds. “Definitely your kind of scene.”

Boyd’s stare could burn a hole through the door.

“So,” Stiles says. “So. Budget and Management. Got any survival tips?”

“You could shut up, for a change,” Boyd suggests.

“You know me better than that, man,” Stiles says. He scuffs his shoe on the wall.

“Do I?”

“Everyone does.”

Boyd tips his chin by a fraction of an inch as if to say, _point_.

“Gerard Argent, dude. Can’t you give me the dirty details? All the hot geriatric gossip?”

“Careful.” Boyd looks sideways. “He was the director.”

“Was, past tense. Now he’s a glorified accountant. Not the boss of me.”

“Isn’t he?”

And it occurs to Stiles to ask himself, how many people usually make _him_ wait for the appointment?

The answer is none. Except for Gerard Argent.

The door cracks open and Allison slides out. Her face is a carefully composed study in blankness. She nods wordlessly at Stiles and Boyd before turning on her heel and walking away, spine ramrod straight.

“Go on.” Body pushes Stiles forward.

Stiles shuffles into the conference room with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

Gerard Argent sits at the far end of the long conference table. Chris Argent sits to his right.

“I thought this was a meeting with Budget and Management department.”

“I _am_ Budget and Management,” Gerard says.

“That was a pretty dramatic, gotta hand it to you,” Stiles says.

Gerard and Chris stare back at him, stone-faced.

“Sit,” Chris says.

Stiles sits down at the opposite end of the table. He folds his hands. “Were you talking with Hawkeye behind my back? That’s so eighth grade of you.”

“We were discussing you,” Chris says, without a trace of irony.

“In what context?”

“The context of your actions today,” Chris says.

“My actions,” Stiles repeats. He flattens his palms against the table and leans forward.

“Your team had orders,” Gerard says.

Someone’s phone buzzes.

“Not me, oh my god,” Stiles says. “I always put my phone on silent before panel interrogations. “

“Me,” Director Argent says with a faint note of surprise. He takes his phone and heads for the door without so much as a “by your leave” or “we’ll pick up this interrogation in a moment” to Stiles.

Gerard’s eyes follow Chris as he walks the entire length of the table, and when Chris shuts the door Gerard’s eyes snap back to Stiles, and Stiles understands that this is where it was going all along.

“Your team had orders,” Gerard repeats.

“Well, they weren’t very good orders,” Stiles says.

“Your team was supposed to be at Battery Park, protecting the head of Whittemore Corp.”

“There were maybe five masks at Battery Park. There were fifty of them to the northeast, a major threat to civilians.”

“The defense of those civilians was not a part of your orders. A squadron of SHIELD agents was assigned to that zone.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, raising his eyebrows. “So Whittemore Corp gets the crack team of superheroes, and the civilians get the grunts?” He tips his chair forward, resting his chin on his palm. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Argent, but it almost sounds as though you’re telling me that the safety of one rich guy from Whittemore Corp was more important than hundreds of civilian lives.”

Gerard’s eyes are hard as flint. “If my memory serves me well, you weren’t saving civilian lives. You were two blocks away from the rest, detonating a parking garage. Not only did you disobey initial orders, you disobeyed secondary orders.”

“You wanna know something really interesting that I’ve noticed about this conversation?” Stiles says, on impulse.

Gerard doesn’t look interested at all.

“Here’s what’s really interesting,” Stiles says anyway. “You’re Budget and Management. Your job is to tear me a new asshole over property damage. But you know what we haven’t mentioned? Money. Not even once. Only orders.” He looks up.

Gerard Argent sits silently at the head of the table.

Stiles wonders if he’s gone too far.

“You want to talk money, Stilinski?” Gerard says. “Share a few patents. Then we’ll have a discussion.”

“Not a chance, buddy,” Stiles says, and he can’t remember when his fingertips crept up to the arc reactor embedded in his chest. “Not as long as the head of Whittemore Corp is more important than three hundred civilians.”

Stiles can see Gerard Argent lick his teeth, and his skin prickles.

Director Chris Argent opens the door. Gerard Argent’s posture shifts by millimeters.

“Now,” Chris says. “Let’s finish this.”

 

* * *

 

Isaac escorts him home. Rain patters against tinted windows the entire drive back to Stilinski Tower.

They pass the collapsed parking garage. Water drips off molten and twisted steel railings and steams against the still-hot concrete. Stiles forces himself to stare at the smoking rubble.

By the time they reach the Tower, the rain has stopped. The air clings uncomfortably close to his skin.

The elevator is silent the whole way up. That’s the best thing about Isaac, Stiles decides. If Stiles wants to needle someone, Isaac will always take the bait. But if Stiles doesn’t feel like talking at all, he doesn’t have to worry about it. Isaac would probably sooner shoot himself in the foot than be the person to strike up the conversation.

Hawkeye and the Black Widow take their five o’clock tea in the main kitchen every evening. Isaac heads for the kitchen to join them. Stiles would rather skip the Spanish Inquisition. He skirts the kitchen and takes the private elevator to his workroom.

“Order me a pizza, BEACON?” he asks.

“Not advisable, sir,” says the crisp voice that issues from the walls. “This will be your third pizza this week.”

“When have I ever been advisable?” Stiles asks BEACON as he steps out of the elevator. He taps the code into the keypad and the lights flicker on his lab.

“I’m home, sugar,” he tells Dum-E the robot, who is more or less a mechanical arm. Dum-E whirs and clicks affectionately.

Stiles assures himself that he’s not projecting or anything. He’s just really good with robots.

“What the hell happened with the parking garage?”

Stiles stumbles and nearly chokes on his own spit. “Jesus. Don’t do that.”

Derek Hale looms behind the workbench, looking larger and more displeased than ever.

“I don’t remember giving you the access code.”

“You didn’t.”

“Do I want to know how you got it?”

“Lydia,” Derek says.

“You’re right, I don’t,” Stiles says.

“Answer me,” Derek insists.

Derek goes all monobrow when he’s frustrated, and his jaw kind of juts out. It makes Stiles’ stomach flutter in interesting ways. But then, Stiles had always had shit instincts.

He pulls a dinged up gauntlet across the work bench and snaps his fingers. Holograms of the guts of an Iron Man suit materialize, filling the room with a galaxy of circuits and gears.

“Stiles,” Derek grits out. He’s bathed in the soft blue light of the holograms. Stiles stares at him for half a beat too long.

Derek’s eyes flicker red.

Stiles finally takes pity on him. “Alright, alright, keep your panties on.” He flicks his wrists, banishing his holograms to the far corners of the lab. “What do you wanna know? I thought you already went over the footage.”

“I want to know why you thought it was a good idea to _bring down a parking garage_ ,” Derek says.

“There were no civilians inside when I got there,” Stiles says. “It only got swarmed out of nowhere after I went in, and there were too many to fight off by myself. So I dropped the damn parking garage on them, so what?”

Derek takes a step closer. “You went in to an unsecured building with no back up.”

“I was being _useful_. Lydia, Allison, and Scott were tied up fighting. If I shouted for one of them, they’d probably have lost their heads, literally. They wouldn’t have got there in time, anyway. I had maybe forty-eight seconds to decide, Derek.”

“And do you want to explain to me why you were over forty-eight seconds away from your teammates? Checking out an empty parking garage?” Derek demands.

“I fight above-ground, yeah? I’m usually flying,” Stiles says. “So I get the Battleship view of shit, you know? And their pattern was _weird_.” He tries to sketch his words with his hands. “Not like the mooks we’ve fought before. These ones already looked different, right? No insignia like Doom or HYDRA, masks all welded to their faces-”

“What?” Derek is momentarily thrown.

A small, mean part of Stiles is vindictively pleased. “Yeah, those masks they had? Not just Party City crap. Lydia checked one of the bodies out. The masks were literally welded to their faces, so if you try to peel them off, their face comes with it.”

Derek looks faintly disgusted.

“Yeah, and it wasn’t just the mask thing. They fought weird. You know how Doom likes his classical Roman tactical shit, amateurs fight like it’s 1960’s Venezuela, that kind of thing. Everybody’s got a strategy. But these guys fought all scattered. They even came out weird. You can usually pick out specific points where they came from, but these guys were just popping up all over the map, like randomized video game shit. Only point they weren’t coming from was-“

“The parking garage area,” Derek finishes for Stiles.

“Yep,” Stiles says.

Derek stands in silence, digesting the information. Then he looks up. “You dumb shit.”

_“What.”_

Derek takes another step forward. “You thought they looked funny, and that was a good enough reason to fly in solo with no information and come within forty-eight seconds of getting yourself killed? You could have gotten everyone killed, what the fuck did you think would happen? What do you think you’re proving?”

Stiles flushes hot with shame. “When you put it like that…” he says. He scrubs his hand over the back of head.

All at once, Derek deflates, like Stiles has stuck a needle in him. Stiles becomes acutely aware that they’re standing very, very close together. If he tipped his head forward, they’d bump noses.

Stiles takes a small step back.

Derek reaches out a hand to touch the gash over Stiles’ eyebrow. “You get this checked out?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all good. It wasn’t even deep enough to stitch up.”

“You look like shit.”

Stiles snorts. “If you think I look bad, you should see what’s left of my armor.”

Derek turns away, but not before Stiles catches the corner of his mouth twitching into a small, wry smile. Derek turns to inspect Dum-E. “You’ve never let me in here.”

Stiles raises his eyebrows. “You’ve never asked to come in here.”

Derek ignores him, leaning closer toward Dum-E. Dum-E tilts and beeps in response.

“You can ask for things, you know,” Stiles tells him.

Derek grunts.

“Sirs, Miss Martin requests you both upstairs for dinner in five minutes.” BEACON announces. “‘Or else’, she requested that I add.” His voice is dry as the desert wind.

 

* * *

 

Stiles will never get over how deeply fucking weird it is, that at two o’clock they can beat up some masked lunatics shooting up Battery Park, and by six o’clock they’ll be sitting around the table and digging into family-sized servings of shitty Chinese food like it’s house Scrabble night or something.

“Hey, no phones at the table,” Scott says, jabbing Isaac with his disposable chopsticks.

Isaac aims a retaliatory stab at Scott. “I’m checking Twitter. Blowing up over Battery Park and the parking garage incident, as usual.”

Lydia looks up. “Oh, really? What are they saying?” She likes to keep tabs on the Avengers’ social media presence.

“The usual,” Isaac says. “About fifty-five percent claiming you people are heroes, seven percent conspiracy theories, three percent close up pictures of everyone’s butts-“

Lydia smirks.

“-six percent wondering where the Hulk was-“

Derek frowns.

“-eleven percent claiming that Stilinski is a national security threat.”

Stiles shrugs. “What’s new?”

Allison pulls out her own phone. “Twitter user limefucker63 tweeted a rant in sixteen parts at you.”

Scott chokes on a wonton.

Stiles peers over her shoulder to read. “You know what kills me?” he says. “This guy is limefucker63. Like, picture him sitting his ass down to make his account and Twitter goes ‘We’re sorry, username “limerfucker” is already taken’. So then he has to settle for limefucker63.”

Scott laughs, a full-bellied chair-shaking laugh. Allison dimples.

Lydia sets her chopsticks down. “Laugh it up. But I think that limefucker63 says some things that you ought to consider.”

“Now you? You’re going to do this here?” Stiles asks in disbelief.

Lydia’s eyes flash. “As a matter of fact, I am. You’re so good at thinking, why don’t you ever do it when it counts?”

Stiles tries hard not to let his feelings be hurt.

Scott gets that pinched look on his face that means he’s about to start yelling, and he rises halfway out of his chair. Allison puts her hand on his shoulder, forcing him back into his seat.

“That’s _enough_ ,” Derek says. The tail end of his words is clipped off in a snarl.

An oppressive silence settles over the group.

Stiles is a lot of things, but a brave man isn’t one of them. He takes his plate and he leaves.

 

* * *

 

 The Black Widow finds him on the roof.

“I don’t remember giving you the access code to this place,” he says.

“You didn’t.”

“Do I want to know how you got it?”

“Derek,” she says.

“You’re right, I don’t.”

She stands next to him, facing the sunset. A red sun dips behind the New York skyline.

“I forget how young you are, sometimes,” she tells him. “I forget you’re a civilian. Not trained like an agent. Or a soldier.”

He figures that’s the best apology he’s going to get from her.

Stiles still remembers the first time they met. It had been not too long after he got home from Afghanistan. He was very, very drunk, and lying face-down on the lawn in front of a fancy Italian place.

 _“Let me guess_ ,” Lydia had said, prodding him with the tip of her shoe. “ _Daddy issues_.”

“ _Nope, no_ ,” Stiles had said, turning over with great effort. “ _My dad is the best. The best, man_.” He had put up a hand to shield his face from the bright lights. “ _If you don’t count the part where he’s dead_.”

‘ _Stiles Stilinski_ ,” she had said, with a bit of dawning wonder. Then she’d hauled him up by the armpits. Three weeks later, Director Chris Argent of SHIELD came knocking with an offer he couldn’t refuse.

SHIELD had offered him penance. Stiles had come back from Afghanistan with shrapnel in his heart, a nuclear reactor in his chest, and the understanding that his company had taken the weapons he’d created and deliberately sold them to the wrong hands, hands that took hundreds upon thousands of innocent lives.

He spent sleepless nights wondering what his parents would think, until he finally came to the conclusion that he didn’t _want_ to know what they would think. But he knew what they would do. They would make it right.

So he joined the Avengers.

“You were right about one thing,” Lydia says.

“Oh?” Stiles is going to savor this moment. Lydia hardly ever admits that anyone other than herself is right.

“Today’s fight was wrong. More wrong than usual,” she says.

“Did you put in the…samples for DNA analysis?” he asks, thinking of the stringy bits of flesh and charred skin that had ripped off with the matte steel masks.

“Yes. Anonymously, with a private contractor.”

He turns to look at her. Lydia is carefully not facing him, still staring out at the gathering dusk.

“I’m going to retrieve the results in a week,” she says. “Have Danny pencil me in at a meeting, and put it in the records. I want an alibi.”

“He’s gonna make me actually show up and do paperwork, you know,” Stiles sighs.

Lydia rolls her eyes. “I don’t care. Why were you tied up at SHIELD so long today?”

“Budget and Management,” he says, with an expressive shudder.

The Black Widow narrows her eyes. “With Gerard Argent?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t like him.” It’s not a question.

“No.” Stiles licks his lips, trying to choose the right words. “He really doesn’t vibe as the kind of guy who would just shuffle off to Budget and Management in his old age and leave his son to play with the big boys, you know?”

“No, he doesn’t,” she agrees. “But you don’t help yourself, when you withhold your best weapon tech from him. He’ll try to get back at you.”

“Nobody is having it but me,” Stiles says stubbornly. Lydia should know better, he thinks.

Lydia sighs, but for once she lets it go. “You need talk to Derek,” she says, switching subjects again. “About team things. I know he’s touchy on the subject of the wolf. But I think we’ll need him on the field again before long.”

“Since when is Derek my responsibility?” Stiles grouses. “Scott’s the captain here. I’m just the hired gun.”

Lydia doesn’t reply.

When the sun slips off the horizon, she is gone.

 

* * *

 

 Stiles hits the practice mat for the third time in as many minutes. This time he stays down, lying flat on his back and examining the cracks in the training room ceiling paint.

Scott’s concerned face swims into view. “Maybe we’ll call it night?” he suggests.

“Yeah. Sure.” Stiles wipes the sweat out of his eyes and takes Scott’s proffered hand, pulling himself to his feet.

Scott heads upstairs. Stiles retreats to the wall, where Derek lurks.

“You’ve done better,” Derek says, by way of greeting.

“Hello to you to, sunshine,” Stiles says. “It’s not even close to a fair fight, honestly. I don’t see how you can expect me to be much of anything without the suit.”

“You can’t expect to always have the suit,” Derek says.

Stiles empties the contents of his water bottle over his head in a vain attempt to soothe his hot and flushed skin. “I work very hard to make sure that I can usually expect the suit,” he says, rubbing cool water over his neck.

Derek says nothing. His eyes flicker over Stiles once before he turns back to the training mats, so Stiles leans against the wall next to him and tries hard not to notice the heat and the closeness of Derek.

Hawkeye and the Black Widow step up to spar. Stiles likes to watch them fight. It’s a study in complementary opposites.

Allison favors short, tight attacks. She strikes with compact, bone-breaking force, and she shoots pin precise. Lydia is honestly less a spider and more a snake, the way she moves sinuously and winds herself around her opponent, surrounding them and gently squeezing the breath out of them, the way her little knives sting like fangs.

“Hey Derek, man,” Stiles says, watching as Lydia wraps her thighs around Allison’s neck. “Wanna go for a round or two?” he says, without thinking.

“No.”

Allison flips and slams Lydia to the mat.

“Why not?” Stiles asks.

Lydia hooks a leg behind Allison’s knee and sweeps her to floor.

“It’s not safe,” Derek says.

Allison rolls and manages to pin Lydia.

“I don’t know if this has escaped your attention or what,” Stiles says, “but our _job_ isn’t safe.”

“He’s right,” Allison says sensibly, her hands still around Lydia’s throat. “At least you wouldn’t be one of the things actively trying to kill us.”

Derek teeth flash in the light. “I could knock that right out of your chest by accident,” he says, nodding at the arc reactor.

Lydia grabs Allison’s thumbs and twists out, breaking Allison’s hold on her neck.

“So?” Stiles asks, splaying his fingers over the miniature nuclear reactor sitting snug in his chest. “Pop it back in within two or three minutes and I’m good to go, no harm, no foul. I’ve got like nine spares in the workroom.”

He’d sooner die than admit that a lot of his nightmares do feature gaping holes in his chest, his reactor gouged out and his heart ticking to a stop.

Lydia and Allison concede to a draw and flop back on the mat, exhausted.

“I could do worse,” Derek says tersely.

Stiles gets the feeling that they’re not really arguing about sparring any more.

“You could,” Stiles says. He sucks his cheeks in. “But would you?”

“I have.”

“Oh my god, it’s about that again?” Stiles lets his breath out with a puff. “You slipped up and lashed out at Scott once,” he says. “ _Once_. It didn’t even dent his shield. And Scott sure as shit doesn’t care anymore.”

“What if it had been you? Then what?”

“But it wasn’t, Jesus Christ, why are we sitting around debating hypotheticals? Do you just like having excuses to brood?”

Lydia sits up. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she says, eyes sharp and shrewd. “That’s why you don’t come in on missions anymore. You think when you’re the wolf, you’ll end up hurting one of us in the middle of a fight.”

A muscle in Derek’s jaw twitches. Without another word, he turns and stalks out of the training room.

Lydia looks down at Allison, who is still stretched out flat on the mat. “He’s got a real gift for leaving conversations dramatically, doesn’t he?”

“He’s even better at it than my dad,” Allison agrees.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Stiles says, slouching back against the wall. “He used to tell me every other day he was going to rip my throat out. And now he decides to get touchy about it?”

Lydia and Allison ignore him. They mop up the sweat-spotted mat and wind towels around their necks and collect their things.

“We’re not a team,” he can hear Lydia say to Allison as they leave. “We’re a time bomb.”

They leave Stiles alone, sitting on the edge of the mat with his arms wrapped around his knees.

He wonders what exactly the point of him is, if he’s so breakable without the suit.

He wonders what he’s worth.

 

* * *

 

  _“We are the stuff of stars_ ,” Claudia Stilinski says. Her fingertips glow like stars and Stiles’ bedroom ceiling is a milky swirl of stars and nested at the center of his chest, a star glows hot and close like the sun.

“ _We are the stuff of stars_ ,” his mother repeats and she touches him right over the heart.

“ _We are the stuff of stars_ ,” but she has disappeared and all that’s left is a reverberating echo.

“ _We are the stuff of stars_ ,” moving away like ripples on a pond as one by one the stars go out.

“ _We are the stuff of stars_ ,” and the star planted in his chest flickers out. He can’t breathe.

“ _We are the stuff of stars_ ,” and a ping of a struck tuning fork grows louder and louder until it fills the void with an unending scream.

Stiles jerks awake in a panic and falls off his bed.

He struggles out of his bed sheets, clawing at his chest until he finds the arc reactor humming safe and steady.

“Shall I call for help, sir?” BEACON asks, unnaturally loud in the still of the night.

“No, no,” Stiles says, standing up on shaking legs. “Just a dream.”

He tugs the sheets off the bed and wraps them around his shoulders like an oversized shawl, padding out to the empty living room. He doesn’t bother turn the lights on. The arc reactor lights his way.

“Movie, BEACON?” he asks, sinking into the couch.

“Any particular requests?” BEACON asks.

“Just…anything, I don’t give a fuck.”

The television flickers on and the open credits to Star Wars roll across the screen.

He pulls the sheets closer and leans back, willing his overworked heart to slow down. It seems desperately unfair to Stiles that even if you made yourself safe from starvation or gunfire there were a million things that existed only inside your mind that could eat you up from the inside out.

Sometime later, the couch dips as Derek sits down on the other end.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Why aren’t _you_ sleeping?” Stiles asks.

Derek’s jaw tightens. “You couldn’t get Scott to read you bedtime stories?”

Stiles scrunches his face. “He went back to his room with Allison and Isaac. I’m not interesting in finding out what they’re doing together this time of night.”

Derek snorts. They watch the movie in companionable silence for about twenty minutes, until Stiles begins to itch again for conversation.

He recalls Derek inspecting Dum-E the robot with a curious expression on his face.

“Did you want to know?” he asks. “About the robots.”

“Why?” Derek asks.

Stiles bites down on his tongue. It’s part of Derek’s charm, he thinks. His gift for truncating sentences and clipping off words so that everyone around him has to stretch to fill in the blanks.

“What do you mean, why? Why am I asking you? Why would you want to know? Why are the robots a thing? Elaborate, man.”

“Why robots like _that_?” Derek says.

“ _Like that_? Are you insulting my robots?” Stiles presses a hand to his chest in mock offense.

“Your robots are dumbasses,” Derek says with a completely straight face. “I want to know why you made them that way.” He looks sideways at Stiles, like he’s evaluating him. “Assuming that you did it on purpose.”

“Ha ha.” Stiles draws his blankets up close around him. “Honestly, I didn’t make them for anything in particular. I think I just wanted…that.” He jerks his chin at the screen, where Luke Skywalker and C-3PO and R2-D2 are bickering.

Derek stares at Stiles, his expression unreadable. Stiles squirms, feeling pinned by his gaze.

“I wasn’t great at people, when I was kid,” Derek offers reluctantly.

“Shocking.”

Derek glares at him. “Family was all the friends I needed.”

“Hale Biotech was a family company,” Stiles blurts out.

Derek looks away again. “So was Stilinski Industries.”

“Not really,” Stiles says, index finger tapping on the arc reactor. He tries to catch the light in his hand, but it spills out between his fingers like water. “My mom founded it. My dad was just a regular beat cop. I didn’t start doing stuff for the company until they were both dead.”

Derek doesn’t say anything. His face is smooth and still, but Stiles suspects that he’s toeing the line of something important, so Stiles pretends to be really interested in Chewbacca and Threepio playing space chess while he waits for Derek to get his thoughts together.

“Hale Biotech was a family corporation, so I worked there.” Derek fists his hands in his lap. “But I was complete shit at it, the whole company thing. I just fucked around as a lab assistant. They were grooming my sister Laura for the real stuff.”

“What happened to her?” Stiles asks.

“She ran away. After the big fire.”

Stiles doesn’t need to ask what fire Derek is talking about. Everyone knows about the fire. Stiles had been fairly young, but he still remembers sitting around the television with his mom and his dad.

“ _Good people_ ,” his mother had said. “ _Good scientists_ ,” she’d added wistfully, when the camera panned to the smoking cinders of Hale Biotech headquarters.

“She changed her name,” Derek continues. “Moved to Seattle or whatever. I don’t know what she’s doing.” Derek’s tendons are cording out of the backs of his hands. “She doesn’t call.”

Without thinking, Stiles reaches out and grabs his hands, folding Derek’s clenched fists in his pale fingers. Derek doesn’t speak, breathing shallow and harsh. But slowly his breaths even out and his fists relax, and he keeps his eyes fixed on the screen.

Derek leaves sometime in the middle of the credits. Stiles kicks his legs out into the warm spot that Derek leaves behind, and sprawls on the couch. He slips into a dreamless sleep.

 

* * *

 

 Stiles wakes up to the chatter of news anchors. Somebody has turned on CNN.

“Turn it off,” he groans, pulling the blanket over his head.

Isaac yanks it back again. “Shut up.”

Lydia perches on the arm of the couch, watching the television intently. Allison stands guard next to her, tense and taut as a bowstring. Scott is frowning again. Stiles can sense a looming presence at his back, probably Derek.

Something is wrong.

He grabs Isaac’s elbow and hoists himself into a sitting position, the blankets falling away. “What’s happening?”

The news cameras are set up in front of the White House, where angry protesters spill over the sidewalk and rattle the bars of the gates.

“Who are they Avenging?” one of the signs reads. Somebody has strapped a creative Iron Man effigy to the gate.

”Okay. First of all, rude,” Stiles says dismissively. But something cold settles at the pit of his stomach.

A hawkish CNN reporter holds a microphone in front of a middle-aged man in a faded t-shirt and baseball cap. “Can you talk about why you’re here today?”

“We’re here to ask our policymakers the questions that everyone wants answered, but no one is willing to ask,” he says. He speaks with the heavy vowels and soft consonants of a Midwesterner. “We want to know who these so-called _Avengers_ are accountable to.”

He points at the effigy strapped to the gate. Somebody speared a toy Captain America shield on one of the spikes.

“The Avengers have been responsible for millions of dollars in infrastructural damage. I think that Iron Man’s actions in Manhattan this past week have been a real wake-up call.”

“Can you explain what you mean by accountability?” the reporter asks, glancing out at the camera to share a moment with the audience.

“We don’t know who these people answer to,” the man says. “As far as we can tell, this group operates outside of the law. The Avengers are responsible for the deaths of hundreds, and to the best of my knowledge they have never faced prosecution. Even the Army answers to military courts. Why are we celebrating a rogue paramilitary group as heroes? Who gave them the _right_?” he asks, turning to the crowd of protestors. The crowd roars. “Before the Avengers came, New York City didn’t see a fourth of the attacks it does now. Now it’s an alien magnet.”

Another protestor edges into the camera frame, and the reporter turns to her.

“This country needs to take a good look at the people we’re calling heroes.” She points a boney finger at the gates. “Who are the Avengers? A pair of unnamed assassins, a Nazi-era genetic experiment, a monster, and the teenage Merchant of Death.” Her lips curls. “Why have we forgotten that Stilinski Industries once had a chokehold on the arms trade? Iron Man is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers,” she says. “We shouldn’t let the presence of Captain America legitimize a dangerous, secretive organization. Why aren’t we investigating what Stilinski Industries stands to gain from putting together a massively destructive paramilitary team outside the sphere of legal accountability?”

The protestors strike up a new chant.

“Turn it off,” Scott says, shaking.

The chanting crowd becomes deafening, drowning out the reporter.

“ _Turn it off, BEACON_.”

The screen blacks out, and the Avengers sit in silence.

Stiles wants to peel his skin off, layer by layer, until he gets at the crawling shame eating up his insides.

“Derek,” Scott says, rising off the couch. He measures his movements slowly and deliberately, like a zookeeper stepping into a tiger’s pen. “Take a walk.”

Stiles twists around to look at Derek, who has turned his back on the group. His hands clench and unclench spasmodically. Stiles can’t see Derek’s face, but he knows that Derek’s eyes are washed over with red.

“Derek.”

Derek leaves abruptly, heading for the exit to the roof. He could gut the entire floor of the tower if he loses control, Stiles thinks. It should worry him. Instead, he find himself half wishing that Derek would burn the building down to the roots.

“Isaac, keep an eye on him,” Scott orders.

Isaac stands up and follows Derek out the door, keeping a safe distance. His fingers brush the gun tucked into the waistband of his pants, not that it would do him any good.

Allison springs into action. “BEACON, I want an ID on the two protestors who spoke,” she orders. “Employment history, political affiliations, dig up whatever public records you can.”

“I’m going to get in touch with SHIELD.” Lydia slides off the arm of the couch. “Consult with PR, figure out a containment strategy.”

Nobody is looking at Stiles. He seizes the opportunity to beat a hasty retreat.

 

* * *

 

 The music in the workshop is so loud that Stiles’ lungs vibrate with the beat and his heart rattles against his ribs. It feels good. When he can lay a mechanical problem out on the workbench, his infinite anxieties and twitches and ideas narrow and fold in on one another until his thoughts fit neatly inside his brain and he is one. One heart, one mind, one purpose.

Muffled banging on the door interrupts him. Derek is slamming the heels of his palms on the glass wall.

“Stiles.”

Stiles narrows his eyes and looks back down at his work. He squints through his microscope and delights in the tiny spray of sparks thrown by the minuscule bit of circuitry he’s fiddling with.

One of the many perks of owning his own tower is that he can change the access code any time he wants.

“Stiles!”

Derek remains standing behind the glass, looking murderous.

“BEACON,” Stiles says. “Walls to 100% opacity.”

“As you wish, sir,” BEACON says.

Stiles takes a moment to marvel at how even his own artificial intelligence can sound so disapproving.

After a while, the banging stops and Derek goes away. A very small, secret part of Stiles is disappointed when he goes.

 

* * *

 

 “Your team is frustrated with you,” Danny Mahealani says, dropping an intimidating stack of paperwork on the desk in front of Stiles. “So is SHIELD.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Stiles says, making a face. He chews on his pen cap.

Danny spares him one deeply disdainful look across the expanse of his sleek mahogany desk, before he turns back to his own work. Stiles squirms a bit. He thinks even Gerard Argent might feel uncomfortable under the force of Danny’s gaze.

“You could talk to them, you know,” Danny says, still typing at his computer. “Use your words. I know you have a lot of those.”

“The hell is there to talk about?” Stiles asks, slashing his signature across a page he probably should have actually read.

“This is about the CNN stuff, isn’t it,” Danny says, his voice still perfectly flat.

“So what if it is?” Stiles flip his pen cap at Danny but misses.

“You know they’re wrong. You know that your team is SHIELD-backed, even if the public isn’t allowed to know that SHIELD is a thing,” Danny points out.

Stiles says, “Still, they’re digging up skeletons and flinging shit around. It’s not cute.”

“I don’t know why you’re letting this get to you,” Danny says. “You’ve been getting bad press since quite literally the moment you were born.”

“True,” Stiles admits, thinking of the National Enquirer headline he had framed and hung over his desk in place of a diploma.

 _SHOCKING! HAMMER TECH ENGINEERS ROBOT BABY TO INFILTRATE STILINSKI INDUSTRIES_.

“I keep getting calls, you know. Gerard Argent seems to think you’re withholding tech,” Danny says.

“What happened today is exactly why he can’t have it,” Stiles says. “If I give weapon tech to him, then they’re technically right.” He sticks his tongue out.

“Gerard Argent also seems to think that you’re a loose cannon, a weak link, and a threat to team cohesion.”

“Wow, did he pull that one out of the cop show cliché book?” Stiles says. “What next, he wants my badge and my gun?”

“The Argent family has a real estate subsidiary, largely managed by Gerard Argent,” Danny points out. “A subsidiary that owned the parking garage you detonated.”

“Oops,” Stiles says, not apologetic in the slightest.

“Do you want my opinion?” Danny asks. He closes his files and swivels his black leather office chair around so that he faces Stiles.

“You’re going to give it to me whether I want it or not, aren’t you?” Stiles says. “I made you my CEO, not my counselor.”

Danny wisely ignores him. “Here’s what I think,” he says. “I think your team doesn’t give a shit about protestors. They don’t give a shit about what Gerard Argent has to say. They’re angry that you run away and you don’t talk to them when you need to. If you’re going to throw a tantrum, don’t make it about this shit. They don’t care, I don’t care, and you shouldn’t care.”

“Tantrum? Excuse you, I was extremely productive,” Stiles says.

“Oh, really?” Danny quirks that one-sided smile that means he knows Stiles is purposely ignoring anything important he just said.

“Yes, really. I was incredibly useful. I worked on this awesome arrow for Allison. I call it boomerang arrow, so if she shoots at something and they dodge it comes straight back around and punches out through their eyeball, and I put together this honestly amazing armor mod-“

Danny waves at him. “Call me when you have something useful for the R and D department.” He opens his work files back up.

Stiles recognizes the dismissal. When he leaves, he collects Danny’s words and takes them with him.

He thinks of Scott and Lydia and Allison and Isaac and Erica and even Director Chris Argent, all of them watching him.

He thinks of his mother, the scientist and his dad, the cop. The sword and the shield.

Mostly, he thinks of Derek. He can still hear him asking, “ _What do you think you’re proving?_ ”

 

* * *

 

 The black 1997 Toyota Camry sputters to a halt a street behind and two blocks east of the remains of the parking garage.

“Fucking parallel parking,” Stiles mutters, as he tries to edge in front of the bumper of the candy-apple red Porsche parked behind him to extract the suitcase from the trunk.

He sets off down the sidewalk with the unusually heavy suitcase tucked under his arm, unprotected from the light drizzle of rain. Stiles looks for all the world like another beleaguered young intern trying to survive the city. The passing tourists and professionals don’t even look at him twice. Stiles keeps the car and the briefcase and the outfit just for moments like these.

He checks the rain slicked streets twice before slipping into the alley that leads to the parking garage.

Stiles hadn’t planned to come here in the beginning, but as he drove back to the tower, Danny’s words sat heavy in his mind. Danny, as usual, was mostly right. The breathless news coverage of the protests had lured Stiles down the rabbit hole of self-pity, until he forgot that the real problem was still waiting fifteen minutes away from his tower.

It’s his fault again. It’s his fault that the Avengers have dropped their leads and started worrying about extraneous shit, it’s his fault they’re not an effective team. He’s got to fix this, he’s got to make it up to the rest of them.

He won’t let it be his fault. He won’t be the weak link. Not again.

He stops at the end of the alley, where caution tape ribbons the chain link fence that stands where the back wall of the garage once stood, and drops his suitcase with a heavy thud.

“Looking for something?”

Stiles whirls around.

Isaac and Erica stand shoulder to shoulder, smirking at him.

“Team Rocket,” Stiles sighs. “What the fuck are you two doing here? Is SHIELD following me?”

“I think what the fuck you’re doing here is the more relevant question,” Erica says.

“SHIELD is always watching,” Isaac adds.

“That thing you did when you were jerking off in the shower last night? Weird,” Erica says, unnaturally bright. “I didn’t think that people liked that.”

“Lies. You saw nothing,” Stiles says.

He knows full well that Erica is a liar, but he resolves to go home and sweep the bathroom for surveillance tech anyway.

“You’re not supposed to be out looking for trouble on your own,” Isaac says.

“What are you going to do, report me to Scott or Director Argent?” Stiles says sourly.

Isaac shrugs. “Yes.”

But Erica edges closer to Stiles. Her eyes dart around, checking the windowless walls and the street far behind them. “You bugged, Stilinski?”

“Nope, all offline,” Stiles says, showing his open palms. “And I sweep for suspicious programs and tech every night.”

“Paranoid bastard,” Isaac says.

“Hey, you’re the freaks who claim you watch me in the shower,” Stiles says.

“Here’s the thing, Stilinski,” Erica says. She glances sideways at Isaac. “We didn’t actually follow you here. We came on our own to check it out. Off the clock.”

“Why?”

“Because even though you fucked everything up, you were on the right track,” Isaac says unexpectedly. “None of this is right.”

“We got assigned to a different case,” Erica says. “A sleeper cell in Hong Kong. We’re supposed to ship out tomorrow.”

“We’ve never not been assigned to any case that the Avengers are affiliated with, though,” Isaac adds. “We’re the official liaison.”

“So earlier today I tried to pull the files on this stuff, just to check it out. System told me I didn’t have the security clearance,” Erica says.

“Here’s the thing,” Isaac says. “We’re supposed to have top clearance, because we deal with Avengers shit all the time. So they’re keeping us off this stuff for a reason.” He runs his fingers through his damp hair, visibly frustrated.

Stiles picks a bit at the half-healed cut on his left forearm. “So we stepped in big shit and your bosses are actively working to make sure we don’t look too close at our shoes, is what you’re saying.”

“Sure,” Erica says. “If you wanna use a shitty analogy.” She winks at Stiles.

Isaac rolls his eyes. “So what was your plan here, Stilinski? I really hope you weren’t planning to go in there.”

“Nope,” Stiles says. “Even I wouldn’t be that stupid. Maybe. I came to run a deep scan and map the area, so I can go home and work with my holograms. What were you two going to do? Stand shoulder-to-shoulder, stare out at the rubble cinematically?"

“We figured a less high-tech version of what you want to do,” Erica admits. “Scope it out, check the perimeter, maybe get up on the roof of one of building nearby and look at it above-ground.”

“You got a few minutes before you do that?” Stiles asks. He pulls out a thin, flat device out of his pocket.

Isaac inspects it. “Looks like a phone, if you ask me.”

Stiles wags his finger. “Not a phone, young padawan. Watch.”

He crouches down, touching the device to the ground. It glows to life. “It’s a compact scanner. It’ll give me all kinds of data on whatever’s going on in the foundations of this area-heat signature, radar, radioactive traces, all the goodies.”

“Ooh,” Erica says. She pushes her hair back behind her ear, looking intrigued. “I know what I’m asking from Santa for Christmas.”

Stiles squats close to the ground, keeping one hand on his tech and the other on the suitcase. He compulsively flicks one of the clasps open and shut, the way he usually clicks on a pen during a press conference.

“So,” he says conversationally, watching the deep scan progress. “You guys busy tonight? I’ll buy dinner. Your pick, if you promise not to tell this to Derek or Scott or any of the others.”

He twists around to look back up at them.

“I’m thinking Thai,” Erica says. “Isaac-“

A gunshot rips through her bulletproof vest like rice paper.

A fraction of a second later, a twin blossom of blood blooms on Isaac’s shirt.

For the space of a heartbeat, Stiles can only stare up at their frozen faces.

He twists around again, lashing out and kicking the suitcase slightly ajar so that pieces of his armor come flying out towards him and slot in place just in time to block the third shot that come whistling toward him, deadly quiet.

Stiles lunges left, staying low to avoid the hail of bullets. Only about half his armor has gotten out of the suitcase. The lid is still hanging on by a clasp. His gauntlets and helmet are trapped inside, which means that he’s got no repulsors, and no BEACON.

Four masked figures in black approach from the rubble, like horsemen out of hell.

A bullet strikes his side, knocking the wind out of him but barely leaving a dent in his armor.

Their bullets aren’t strong enough to punch through his suit, Stiles thinks, and maybe if he can keep from getting shot in the head he’ll get out of here alive.

His spark of hope flickers out as fast as it’s born. One of the spooks stows away its gun and takes out a long knife, slitting the chain link fence from bottom to top the way that expert butchers gut hogs.

Stiles tries to remember how they fought last time.

He looks at the approaching masked faces, and time slows down.

They weren’t an army. They didn’t fight like soldiers. They fought like covert agents, with that particularly tight, fast, economically bone-crunching blend of martial arts.

A lone armor plate rattles at his leg, loose without the rest of the leg armor to snap it together. He rips it off and hurls it at the lead spook, who tips its head by a fraction and avoids the armor plate effortlessly.

Until Stiles snaps his fingers and the armor plate curves back around, smashing into the spook’s skull on the way back to Stiles.

It’s not much. But it’s enough to be a distraction.

Stiles lunges for the suitcase.

The other three shoot at him, and he can feel something white-hot burn through his thigh, but the rest of his armor flies out to cocoon him and his helmet snaps in place just in time, as two of the spooks descend on him.

They are unnaturally strong. One latches onto his right arm and he can feel the armor begin to scream under the force.

Suitcase armor, he remembers. Lightweight. Limited flight capabilities. He’ll have to fight if he wants to get out.

“BEACON, fry ‘em,” he orders, and he releases a pulse of energy from his repulsors. The one trying to twist his arm off arcs back and falls to the ground crackling with blue, thrashing and twitching like a cockroach on its back.

They don’t scream, he realizes. They are silent.

He’s never fought a silent enemy before.

Two of the three remaining spooks empty their clips at his chest. The bullets don’t get through his armor, but the force of the shots pummels him backwards.

The third jumps at his back, aiming its knife into the joint of his armor, between his shoulder and his arm.

“BEACON, reverse thrusters at 70%,” he chokes out.

He flies backward, slamming the spook at his back into the brick wall. The knife screeches as it skids off the armor, the spook still clawing at his back.

Stiles says, “Again,” and he smashes back into the wall hard enough to make himself nauseous, and the spook’s neck finally snaps.

Brick dust rains down on Stiles and the last two spooks, clouding his vision.

But it clouds their vision, too.

“Infrared,” he snaps at BEACON, and as soon as the world goes blue and green and yellow and red, his foes materialize burning red from the smog and he fires two quick repulsor shots. They hit the ground with a crunch, leaving behind the lingering smell of burning flesh.

The dust clears, and the world is quiet.

His scanner pings.

He turns his head, feeling as though his mind is very far away from his body, and he sees his scanner lying on the ground where he left it. He looks farther, over the wasteland of rubble, but nothing stirs. Nobody comes running from the street far behind him, either. The fight was quiet and brutal and far away from streets where people are still going about their daily business.

Stiles looks at the dead bodies at his feet. He looks at Isaac and Erica, and he can hear their voices in his head.

 _We’re supposed to ship out tomorrow_.

 _System told me I didn’t have the clearance_.

He’s not going to call SHIELD. He’s not going to let them find him in this alley.

Isaac died with his fingers at his gun. It makes Stiles sick at heart, but he doesn’t flinch away when he folds Isaac’s limp fingers around the trigger and fires at dead spooks. He repeats the process with Erica. He examines the jagged repulsor holes he left on two bodies, and then empties the clip. Close enough. They’ll have to put the bodies through autopsy before they can confirm that he was here, and even SHIELD has a turnaround time on forensic examinations.

His work finished, he takes a moment to linger over Isaac and Erica. They stare back at him blankly. He wishes that he could close their eyes. Their loss feels less like pain and more like hollowness, as if someone has taken an apple corer and carved out his insides.

“Sir,” BEACON says in his ear. “I recommend you seek immediate medical attention, you are at serious risk of infection.”

“No can do, BEACON, sorry,” Stiles says. “I want the armor off, now,” he says, and he sheds the skin of armor plates.

All at once the pain assaults him, and his leg almost gives out from under him.

“No, no way, not now,” Stiles says to himself. “I’m getting the fuck out.”

Stiles stuffs the lightweight armor back into the case and pockets the scanner. He doesn’t dare look down at his leg.

Leaving Erica and Isaac’s bodies behind is almost more difficult than watching them die.

He limps out onto the street and takes a meandering route back to his car, holding the suitcase over his leg in a lame attempt to cover the wound.

The best thing about New York is the halal carts. The second best thing about New York is that nobody pays any mind to a suspicious teenage billionaire hobbling down the sidewalk.

When he gets to the car, he heaves the suitcase into the passenger seat and takes a moment to breathe. He means to allow himself three seconds worth of dry sobs, but before he knows it his heart is beating hard and erratic and his breath is stopping up cold in his lungs. It feels like dying.

Panic attack, he thinks, and he presses numb fingers against the arc reactor under his shirt, as if it would hold his heart inside his body.

 _You’re not dying_ , his dad used to say to him, a lifetime ago. _I’m right here with you_.

It’s a long while before he manages to turn the keys in the ignition.

 

* * *

 

 Stiles collapses in his workroom.

“Dum-E, Dum-E buddy, get me the first aid kit, would you?” he pleads.

Dum-E obligingly rolls over with the steel box he keeps under the workbench

“Sir, three of your four teammates are 75.54% more experienced than you in delivering emergency medical care, I strongly recommend you call upstairs,” BEACON says.

“Not a chance, BEACON, not a freaking chance,” Stiles says. “Light, Dum-E,” he orders.

Dum-E shines strong fluorescent lights on his wound, and Stiles tries hard not to retch from the pain as he digs around in his thigh with a pair of steel tweezers for the bullet. Thankfully, the bullet comes out intact. Fragments would have been too difficult for him.

“Pain meds, double fast. Get on that,” he tells Dum-E. He looks down at his mangled, bloodstained jeans. “And maybe pants.”

He douses the open wound with antiseptic, swears loudly and fluently when he stitches it up, and then pops the pills that Dum-E brings him.

“Burn it,” Stiles tells Dum-E, balling up his bloodstained jeans and lobbing them at his robot. “You never know who’s going through your laundry,” he muses. “Normally I would say Erica-but, you know.”

He drags himself over to the workbench, bringing the scanner with him. He means to do some investigative work in the maybe forty-eight hours he has left before SHIELD finds the bodies and starts finishing up their autopsies and connecting the dots.

So of course, he blacks out.

 

* * *

 

 When Stiles returns to consciousness, someone is prodding him gently, fingers checking his vitals to make sure he’s okay.

He opens his bleary eyes. “Derek?”

Derek jerks back as if burned.

“Hey now, big man,” Stiles says, grabbing Derek’s arm without thinking. “How did you get in?”

“I let him in, sir. You were unconscious,” BEACON says.

“So you called him?” Stiles says.

“No, I came down on my own,” Derek says.

“What for?”

“I brought your dinner down,” Derek says.

A steaming plate of pasta sits at the corner of the workbench

Stiles stares at Derek.

“Scott told me to,” Derek says.

“Sure. Scott told you to,” Stiles says.

Derek abruptly turns to leave.

“Hey, don’t-stay with me?” Stiles asks. “Please.” He realizes that he’s still holding on to Derek’s arm, so he lets go.

Derek exhales deeply, but he stays. “What were you doing?”

“I-“

“Don’t lie. You’re not good at it,” Derek says.

Stiles looks into Derek’s eyes. And he knows that when Derek says _don’t lie_ , what he’s really saying _is don’t lie to me_.

“I was,” he starts, and he looks down. His hands are shaking. “I got into trouble.”

“You went off on your own again,” Derek says.

A spark of anger he didn’t know was still inside him flares up. “I was trying to do something useful, for a change.”

“Useful,” Derek repeats.

Stiles laughs, and he sounds bitter and tired even to himself. “They call us a superhero team, Derek. But fucking hell, I’m just- a battery-powered liability. I’ve got a body count in the thousands. This is the least I can do for the team, and for anyone I’ve ever been responsible for.”

Derek’s brows draw together. “This is- you’ll get yourself killed trying to be useful, because you think that you need to prove something?”

“So what if I will?” Stiles can’t remember when he started yelling. “Maybe I owe it to a lot of people, to be useful. And maybe I do owe my life.”

Something small in Derek’s expression shifts. “You were twelve,” Derek says. “When your company had you building weapons for trade in the Middle East. Your parents were dead, what the hell could you have done?”

“Twelve is old enough to know what a bomb does when it goes off.” Stiles’ voice cracks, and he hates himself a little for it. “I should have been strong enough to say no. If this is what it costs me to make up for what I did in the arms trade before I joined this team, then I’ll do it. And if this is what I have to do to deserve my place on this team, then I’ll do it.”

Derek’s face goes hard. “I was fifteen.”

“What does that-“

“I was fifteen when I met a woman named Kate,” Derek says, cutting Stiles off. “She was twenty-three and told me she loved me. So I gave her my keycard to the lab. She locked my family inside and burned the building down.”

Stiles turns cold.

“So I ran in and pulled one of the experimental serums,” Derek continues. “And I injected it straight in my heart. But it was too late. So I ripped her apart, limb from limb.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Stiles asks, shaking.

“None of us are the heroes you think you need to be. We’re all responsible for something. If you think you’re more risky or more at fault than anyone else on this team, you’re fooling yourself. You belong here with us. You’re part of the team.”

Stiles scrubs a hand over his face. He can’t bring himself to meet Derek’s eyes. “When did you learn to use your words?”

“About the point you stopped using yours.”

“Touché.”

Silence hangs heavy in the air.

“So,” Stiles says. “We’re in deep shit. It’s SHIELD.”

“How do you know?”

He slides the scanner toward Derek. “Isaac and Erica-“ his voice trips, but he pulls himself together. “Isaac and Erica are dead.”

Derek sags against his seat, but Stiles presses forward. He’ll allow them to grieve when everyone else is safe.

“SHIELD pulled them off our case and tried to ship them out to Hong Kong, and when Erica tried to check the files it locked her out. They went to go investigate the site, but there were masks waiting for us. And I suspect that if they hadn’t bothered investigating and just shipped out like SHIELD ordered, they would have never made it to Hong Kong,” Stiles says.

“Anything else?”

“I did a little homework,” Stiles says. “Snooped into SHIELD’s archives a teensy bit. Records of a bunch of killed or MIA agents have been slowly disappearing over the past year or so. Lucky for us, I’ve always suspected SHIELD operates more or less like the Nixon administration, and I’ve been archiving my own copies of SHIELD records on the down-low for the past three years.”

“So?”

“I’d bet my life on it that if Lydia ever comes back with those DNA samples from the masked freaks, they’re gonna match data from some of these mysteriously disappearing records,” Stiles says.

Derek looks down at his hands. “We’ll need a plan.”

“Yeah. About that,” Stiles says. “I think I kind of have one.”

“Oh, really?”

Stiles glances at Derek, at the hard lines of his face and the softness around his eyes and the way his pulse winds through the muscle of his arms, and his brain automatically supplies _beautiful_. And Stiles knows that he’s completely fucked.

“You’re not going to like it,” Stiles says. “In fact, you’re going to fucking hate it.”

Derek’s lips tighten into a thin line, and Stiles can see red flicker deep in his eyes.

Stiles is an engineer, not a psychiatrist, but he knows Derek well enough to guess that Derek’s not used to expressing things like anxiety and worry and fear, so he filters it all through barely repressed anger.

“Hey,” he says, reaching out. “Do you trust me?” As soon as the words escape from his mouth, he wants to cram them back inside, but it’s too late.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Yes,” Derek says.

They’re nearly nose to nose. Stiles can feel the edge of the workbench digging into his back. “Okay,” Stiles huffs out, and he tries to ignore the fact that he’s close enough to see a kaleidoscope of colors reflected in Derek’s eyes. “Okay, we can work with that.”

“Yes,” Derek repeats.

“Is that the only word you’re going to use from now on? You just used up all your words just now, didn’t you? Oh my god.”

“Shut up,” Derek grumbles, and he curls a large hand around the back of Stiles’ neck and pulls him forward into a rough kiss.

Stiles gets only three seconds of utter shock before Derek pulls back a bit. He has to look down at his arc reactor and check that his poor heart is still ticking away. His cheeks burn hot and he becomes hyper-aware of his lips.

“The plan?” Derek asks, as if nothing at all happened.

Their foreheads are pressed together and Derek’s hand still rests at the back of his neck.

“Right, the plan.” Stiles tries to stand, and he swears and wobbles on his leg. He glances at Derek, who stares up at him in askance. “I may have kind of gotten shot a little bit,” he says. He thinks of Scott and Lydia. “I’m fucked, aren’t I?”

“So fucked,” Derek agrees.

 

* * *

 

 

Stiles leans over the kitchen sink, using one hand to stuff his face with strawberry jam-filled doughnut and using the other to twirl the dial on the landline kitchen phone.

He bought a powder blue rotary telephone for the kitchen at one of those musty, sweetish smelling Brooklyn shops staffed by bored Lena Dunham lookalikes. Everyone thought that he’d been making fun of Scott, but Scott really did have trouble with smartphones and tablets sometimes.

“Hello?”

“Oh, Danny-boy,” Stiles sing songs into the receiver.

“Stiles.” Danny has the rare gift of boiling down complicated emotions into single syllable expressions.

“Danny the man. Danny-oh.”

“What do you want?”

“You wound me, Mahealani, truly,” he says around a mouthful of jam doughnut.

“Feel free to get to the point anytime this century.”

“I feel so unappreciated. Which is why you should be a darling and schedule a meeting for me in two hours at the Stilinski Industries Manhattan research and development branch right away.”

“You’ve finally got something for them?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Stiles says, wiping sticky powdered sugar fingers on his pants. “Only way to find out is to call and tell them I’m coming in.”

Stiles can hear typing in the background. “You’d better have something good.”

“Oh, I’ve got something good. Pinky swear.”

“Be at the R and D building in an hour and a half,” Danny says, and he hangs up.

“I love you too, dude,” Stiles tells the silent receiver, and he crams the last bit of jam doughnut in his mouth. “And… _cut_.”

He has no doubt about it that SHIELD was wiretapping and listening in on that call. And he has no doubt about it that SHIELD will bite the bait.

Because when you want to tear apart a superhero team, you don’t start with the super spy or the world’s best shot or the soldier out of time or the indestructible wolf.

You go for the battery powered teenager.

 

* * *

 

 Stiles wakes up handcuffed to a rack in a bare concrete cell.

“You know what,” he says, twisting around to check for cameras. “I think this evidences an extreme lack of creativity. I was hoping for one of those awesome glass cells that super villains usually get.”

“You should be grateful we didn’t get creative,” says a voice behind him.

“Hello, Gerard,” he says conversationally, to cover the fact that his pulse goes haywire and he can hear his blood thundering in his ears. “Have you been standing there this whole time waiting for me to wake up? That’s awfully creepy of you.”

Gerard Argent circles the rack and stops in front of Stiles. “Of course not. We’ve calculated the effective timing of the sedative used on you.” Gerard smiles without teeth or mirth.

Stiles’ mouth is bone dry. He licks his lips, trying in vain to sound normal. “You know what, don’t bother smiling at me. It’s even creepier. You should probably also rethink saying ‘we’ all the time. I know you mean SHIELD moles or your minions or whatever, but I keep thinking maybe it’s a little alien dude in your head every time you say that, piloting you like a meat suit. Unless, there really is? You never know with SHIELD these days-“

Without a change in expression, Gerard Argent backhands him across the face.

Stiles lets his head hang limply, trying to suck in a breath through tight lungs. The thing about getting smacked around is that it never looks too bad in the movies, but in real life it hurts like a motherfucker. And then there’s the added sting that he’s getting beaten up by an actual grandpa.

“Nice chat,” Stiles says, making faces to test that his jaw doesn’t click. “What now, are you just gonna leave me in here?” He rattles his shackles.

“No,” Gerard says. “You’re here because I’m going to ask you for something.”

“Hate to break it to you, old man, but when you start wiretapping in order to abduct people from their cars and string them up in your secret dungeons it goes straight from ‘asking’ to ‘taking’.”

Gerard Argent glares at him. Spending time around Allison causes Stiles to forget that the Argents are generally a humorless family.

“You’re going to make this very difficult. A particular talent of yours, isn’t it,” Gerard says.

For once Stiles says nothing, only stares through half-lidded eyes. He doesn’t like where this is going.

Gerard Argent steps forward, and Stiles wishes desperately that he could edge backwards. “You think you’re clever, don’t you? So tell me what I’m going to ask for.”

Stiles chews on his bottom lip. “You were the director, once,” he says, glancing at Gerard Argent. “Before your son took over. You were infamous, you know,” he adds. “For being a controlling hardass. You know I talk a lot, I talked to some senior agents. The council had thought you were too quick on the trigger and too dismissive with the ethics codes.”

Gerard still watches him impassively.

“The Avengers Initiative wasn’t your idea.” Stiles tugs at his cuffs again, but they don’t budge. “It was Chris’ idea. You hate our team. We have a lot of firepower that you don’t have, and we don’t answer directly to SHIELD. We don’t point and shoot where you tell us to, either. So we had to go.”

“Go on,” Gerard says, like Stiles is presenting a school project.

“You figured out pretty fast that in order to run the kind of organization that you wanted from underground you’d have to engineer your own obedient minions. Hence, the masked spooks that used to be agents. What did you do to them, some kind of serum?”

The corner of Gerard’s mouth twitches.

“And you had to splinter the Avengers. So you set up those protests and you stirred up conflicts in the team and you made calls because you knew that it would distract us and make us fight amongst ourselves instead of against you.” Stiles looks up. “And you started with me.”

Gerard leans back. “You made it easy, you know. You were the natural splinter point. I hardly had to do a thing.”

Stiles allows himself to be hurt by that observation, to wince and pull harder at the cuffs leaving deep red grooves in his wrists. “So, I’m here today because when the Avengers are gone and I’m dead, you still want my tech.”

“You could have made this easy,” Gerard says. He stops in front of Stiles, and cold dread pricks Stiles’ skin. “Here’s the thing, Stilinski. I want to make this easy. I don’t want more cover-up work than I have to do. Hand over your codes and your suits, so that I don’t have to go through the trouble of killing everyone in your little tower, and you don’t have to die knowing that you made that happen.”

He gives Stiles a slap to the underside of the jaw, and he flicks the arc reactor with his index finger. “A little young for a pacemaker anyway, aren’t you?”

Stiles starts breathing hard through his nose. He’s running out of time. “No. That’s a terrible offer.”

Gerard leans in close. He stares into Stiles’ eyes, and Stiles feels as though his skin might crawl right off of him. “You’re very stubborn, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Stiles says.

Gerard’s eyes flick down and he taps at his communicator. “A choice was more than you deserved,” he says, and he twists the arc reactor and pulls it right out of Stiles’ chest.

Stiles gasps and lurches forward like a fish out of water, just as the door opens and a masked spook steps in.

“Good,” Gerard says, “Go to-“

He’s cut off abruptly when the spook slams the door shut and aims a bow and arrow at his head.

Almost too fast for sight, Gerard pulls his own gun and levels it at Stiles’ temple.

Stiles chokes out a rattling laugh. “What kind of threat is that? I’m already dying.” Cold sweat trickles down his neck and toward the gaping hole in his chest.

“Grandfather,” the spook says, and pulls off the mask to reveal Allison Argent.

“Allison,” Gerard Argent says, almost disappointed. “If you shoot me, I’ll shoot him, and where will that get us?”

Stile spasms in his shackles, and their words are almost drowned out by the roar of the blood that drives the shrapnel in toward his heart. He has maybe a minute.

For an agonizing moment Allison is so tense she shudders, the bowstring already pulled too taut. And then deliberately, she aims to the right of Gerard head, and when he lowers his gun, she releases the string and shoots into the empty air over his shoulder.

Until the arrow curves midair and punches back out through his chest.

“Boomerang arrow,” she says, satisfied, and she catches the reactor that falls out of Gerard’s limp fingers. Allison slots the arc reactor back into Stiles’ chest and twists it into place with a click.

“Oh god,” Stiles says, chest heaving. “Hey Allison, you didn’t weld the mask on. I’m starting to doubt your commitment to undercover missions.”

Allison rolls her eyes at him and bends down to search Gerard’s pockets. “I don’t suppose you’re going to just give me the keys to the cuffs, will you,” she tells Gerard.

“I would have given you your own team,” Gerard says. Flecks of blood speckle his mouth and chin. “Anything you wanted.”

The set of Allison’s mouth is hard and unforgiving. “I already have a team.” She extracts a single key from Gerard’s pocket and takes the gun from his fingers. Then she settles back on her haunches and points the gun between Gerard’s eyes.

“Why?” Gerard asks. “For the boy, Captain McCall?”

Allison’s eyes glitter. “For my team. For Isaac Lahey and Erica Reyes.” She fires a single shot.

Stiles doesn’t let himself look away from the congealed blood and bits of brain that splatter the floor.

“So. The plan. How long do we have to wait before we clear out?” Stiles asks as Allison sets to work on his cuffs.

As if on cue, alarms blare outside the door.

“Maybe two minutes,” she says. “If Scott and Lydia are doing their work well.”

“Right,” he says, and when the cuffs pop loose he stumbles forward into Allison and nearly knocks her flat. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she says, and grabs his forearms and pulls him straight. “Lucky you like to work on stuff like undetectable subcutaneous trackers in your spare time,” she says, nodding at the half-healed incision on his arm.

“Lucky it worked well this far underground,” Stiles says. “I wasn’t sure that it would be accurate enough for you to pinpoint specific rooms.”

The alarm changes.

Allison’s eyebrows lift. “So Derek came, after all.”

“How do you know?”

“The alarm level.” Allison glances sideways at him. “Anything higher would mean somebody dropped a nuke on Manhattan.”

“Well, what the hell are we waiting for?” Stiles places a palm over the arc reactor, checking that it’s in place.

Allison give him a half-smile before hoisting her bow and kicking the door open.

Stiles is perversely disappointed to discover that the underground complex does not, in fact, look like Gerard Argent’s special dungeon of evil. It looks more or less like the inside of the Pentagon, except that it is completely empty.

“They’ve all gone topside,” Allison says.

Stile gives a low whistle. “They’re really fucking scared of the big bad wolf, aren’t they?”

“They’d be idiots if they weren’t,” Allison says. “Hurry up.”

She leads him down a warren of identical passageways and staircases that seems to stretch for miles. The underground lighting makes the scene feel dreamlike, like maybe he wandered into a David Lynch film.

“Here, Allison says, stopping at a dead end flanked by a pair of elevator doors.

“Which one do we take?”

“The left, I think,” Allison says. “Either way we get topside.”

She presses the button and the doors slide open to reveal an enormous cargo elevator.

Stiles eyes the rusty grating and the suspicious dark stains along the concrete of the elevator shaft. “Great,” he says. “This looks like the kind of elevator where people get murdered.”

“It probably _is_ the kind of elevator where people get murdered,” Allison says, dragging Stiles inside with her.

There are only two buttons, up and down.

“Onward and upward, I guess,” Stiles says, slapping the up button. The cargo elevator screeches and lurches heavenward.

They ride the lift in silence. Stiles is reminded forcibly of Isaac.

When the lift grinds to a halt, the doors open on a generic block of cubicles. As soon as Stiles steps out of the elevator, a bullet whizzes over his head.

“Shit,” he says, and he throws himself to the left and tucks into a roll just as a hailstorm of bullets bounces off the walls of the elevator shaft. He launches himself to his feet in time to see that Allison had thrown herself to the right, and there’s about eight spooks with guns between the two them.

“Find a way out,” Allison shouts at him, sliding into a low crouch and nocking an arrow. It’s the explosive arrow. “You don’t have any weapons. I can take care of this.”

“Right,” Stiles says. Who is he to argue with Hawkeye and her exploding arrows?

His eyes skitter over the surroundings. The sun streaming in through the office windows bleaches the colors in the room. His eyes land on an EXIT TO ROOF sign just as two of the spooks break off from the group attacking Allison and turn his direction.

Stiles breaks into a stumbling run for the door. He shoulders it open and takes the stairs three at a time, the half-healed bullet hole in his thigh screaming a painful protest at him. He bursts out onto the sunbaked roof of the tower, looks at the rubble hundreds of feet below, and wonders what the hell he thought he would accomplish by running here.

Behind him, two spooks emerge onto the roof.

“Shit,” he says again, and he runs for the edge and dives right off of the building.

For one glorious moment he’s in free fall. Then his armor zooms in and cocoons him, snapping into place and scooping him out of freefall and into flight.

He whoops and loops a figure-eight in the sky.

“Glad to have you back, sir,” BEACON says in his ear.

“Iron Man, you in?” Scott asks.

“Hell yeah. Call it, Captain.”

“I want you on the perimeter of the rubble,” Scott says. “Drive them in so me and Lydia and Derek can take care of them.”

Stiles chews his lip and wastes a precious second hanging in the air, considering flying off in the opposite direction. He listens to static and background noise over the com line as Scott grunts and swings, his shield connecting with a spook and laying it to the ground with a thud.

It’s Lydia, of course, who recognizes something is up. “Spit it out, Stilinski,” she says, slight breathlessness being the only indicator that she’s in the thick of a battle.

“Argent had a real estate subsidiary that owns seven buildings in the area, we need to expand the perimeter to include those if we don’t want surprise attacks.”

“Do it. Hawkeye, you in?”

“Yes,” Allison says, and Stiles can just make her out, a speck on the top of the building he just jumped off of.

“Hawkeye, take the north and the west. Iron Man, the south and the east.”

“Got it,” Stiles says, and he flies off to the buildings in the east.

When he hits the pavement to the east, there are still stray pedestrians.

“The hell?” he says. “You didn’t leave when you first heard the shots? Everyone clear out!”

They scatter like ants.

He spots a few masks heading his direction, and he drives them back in easily with a few repulsor blasts. One manages to latch onto his boot, so he shoots upwards and then dives sharply, shaking it off and watching it plunge to its death in the rubble.

Gerard Argent made a mistake, Stiles thinks, when he made the spooks completely obedient. They served him well when he was alive. But now that his brains are splattered across the floor, the spooks compose a dragon without a head. Agents who could think for themselves would go underground and hide, keep the organization alive. But the spooks keep throwing themselves at the Avengers, dying in droves.

The ground shudders and Stiles hears a distant roar. Derek. He wishes that he could go to Derek. But Stiles has a job to do, and he refuses to fuck it up.

All at once there is the expansive boom of many explosions at once, and the shock wave from seven buildings detonating at once tosses Stiles skyward.

He blacks out for just an instant, and when he comes to, BEACON has already steadied him in the air.

Seven smoldering spots scar the city block. Masked spooks pour out of the gaping maws in the ground.

“Hawkeye,” Scott says over the com line. “Come in. Allison! _Please_.”

“I’m alright,” Allison says, a bit shaken. “I’m fine. I wasn’t in any of the buildings.”

“Stiles,” Scott says. “Stiles, are you there?”

“Present,” Stiles says. “Is Derek fine?”

A raspy growl drowns out the others on the com line.

“Very fine, apparently,” Lydia says.

Stiles looks down at the spooks still crawling out of the bomb scars, so many ants pouring out of a kicked hive, and icy tendrils of panic begin to claw up his spine.

“We can’t do this,” he says. “Fuck.”

“Yes we can,” Scott says bracingly. “ _Yes we can_.”

Stiles pushes his tongue against his teeth, trying to focus his thoughts enough to form the right words.

“Whatever you’re thinking of, do it,” the Black Widow says. “We’re going to trust your judgment.”

It’s a very Lydia thing to say in that it manages to be both a warning and a mark of faith.

“BEACON,” Stiles says. “Call Agent Vernon Boyd. Tell him that we’ll need a massive cleanup crew and some squads out on the street, and he’ll need to pull any and all civilians out of the area. But how he decides to do it and what he tells SHIELD is his choice.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Scott, Lydia, Allison, Derek,” he says. “I’ll need you to run interference. Scott and Allison, maybe draw some of them farther out and away? Keep them away from me, specifically. And when I give the signal, run like hell.”

“What are you going to do?” Scott asks.

“I’m going back to my roots, man,” Stiles says. “I’m gonna do what I’m good at. I’m gonna build a bomb.”

Allison sucks in her breath sharply through her teeth. Stiles knows that she knows how he plans to make a bomb strong enough for the job with what he has on hand.

“Are we ready?” Stiles asks.

There’s a ripple of affirmatives over the com line, and Derek growls again, gravelly and low.

“All right,” Stiles says, shaking his fist. “Go team.”

Stiles touches the ground in the center of the rubble with one knee bent and one fist down. He straightens and takes a moment to examine the tableau around him.

Allison and Scott split in opposite directions, pulling some of the spooks away toward the streets. Lydia whirls and cuts through her opponents, scythe-like, and Derek looms above them all as an enormous black-furred wolf, snarling and snapping at his enemies, his jaws bloody.

“Right,” Stiles says. “Down to business. BEACON, armor off.”

His armor falls to pieces around him, and he pulls a small screwdriver and wire cutter from a safe storage compartment hidden in the armor.

“Seriously?” Lydia says, as a masked freak staggers past, Lydia’s legs locked around its waist and her knife jammed in its neck. “You just carry that junk around?”

“First of all, it’s not junk,” Stiles says around the screwdriver in his mouth as he sorts through bits of armor. “And second of all, hell yeah I do. I always have a backup plan. Backup plans are my bitch. I got out of Afghanistan with a fucking screw driver.”

For thirteen tense minutes, the battle rages around Stiles as he sits cross-legged in the eye of storm, fashioning a bomb out of his own cannibalized armor.

“Stiles,” Lydia gasps out. A masked freak sneaks around Derek while he’s busy bodily ripping another spook in half, spraying intestines over the concrete. Lydia throws her knife and it hits the spook dead center in its right eyeball. It crumples to the ground two feet away from Stiles, the knife tip poking out of the back of its head. “We can’t do this much longer.”

“I know, I know, I know,” Stiles says. His hands are sweaty and shaky. “And-there,” he says, connecting the second to last wire. “Everyone OUT,” he shouts.

“Move out,” Lydia screams, pressing the communicator in her ear. She runs for the perimeter. “Allison, Scott, _now_.”

“Derek, OUT,” Stiles says.

Derek swings his massive head to look around at Stiles. There’s no hint of the Derek he knows in those burning red wolf eyes.

“Derek,” Stiles says. He eyes at the blood dripping along Derek’s fangs and clotting in his fur. “I know you’re there. And I want you to get out.”

Derek snarls, and turns to swat away an advancing spook.

“Goddammit, Derek,” Stiles swears, dangerously close to tears. “You’re a fucking idiot, did you know? Fuck you so much.”

He takes a deep breath.

He reaches down and pulls the arc reactor out of his chest.

Derek roars.

Stiles ignore the gut-punch sensation and the cold sweat that beads on his neck. He connects the last wire to the arc reactor.

Twenty seconds.

“ _Get the fuck out_.”

Enormous teeth clamp around the back of his shirt and lift Stiles off the ground. Derek bounds away with Stiles’ limp body gently clamped in his jaws like a little wolf puppy, and Stiles thinks it’s hilarious except for the part where his heart stutters and threatens to stop.

Derek manages to get them pretty far away by the time the bomb blows. But the shock waves still fling them forward into the street. Stiles sprawls flat on the hot pavement. He wonders if any gravel got into the hole in his chest.

“Fuck,” he says, rolling over to have a last look up at the sky before he dies.

He sees thick smoke roiling over the sun, and Vernon Boyd.

Boyd?

“You’re an idiot,” Agent Vernon Boyd says. He tosses an arc reactor to a very human Derek, who deftly slots it in place.

“What the fuck,” Stiles says. “What the fuck. I’m alive.”

New York City falls quiet. Derek sits next to him, bloody and wild but completely human.

“Allison called you,” Stiles says to Boyd

Speaking hurts like hell. His ribs are definitely at least bruised.

“She did.”

Stiles hears the distant screech of SHIELD agents taking down straggler enemies.

He presses his hand against the arc reactor glowing blue and safe in his chest. “These things were in my workroom. I had a passcode.”

“The Black Widow gave it to me.”

“What’s the point of having a secret access code if everyone’s just going to share it with everyone else?” Stiles asks.

“Are you complaining?” Boyd asks.

“No,” Derek says.

Stiles lolls his head sideways to look at him. Derek’s teeth are bloody and his hair is matted purple with blood. Stiles has never seen a more amazing sight in life.

“You’re butt-ass naked, you know?” Stiles says.

 

* * *

 

 It’s the closest thing to a happy ending that Stiles has ever had.

Director Chris Argent gets to show up and mop Gerard Argent’s mess, and Stiles gets to tape up his ribs and go home. There are SHIELD moles to smoke out and a major government organization to repair, but Stiles is going the fuck home.

Nurse Melissa McCall smacks him over the head, but her eyes are wet so Stiles knows she doesn’t really mean it.

They take the jet back to the tower, because the traffic in Manhattan is apocalyptic. That’s kind of the team’s fault. But Scott still is very proud of them. Zero civilian casualties.

During the ride back, Allison and Scott curl themselves together and whisper softly to each other. Any other day Stiles would make a scene. But Isaac is gone now, and it doesn’t seem quite right to make fun of them while they struggle to fill the gap between them that Isaac left.

He thinks briefly of Boyd. To the best of Stiles’ knowledge, only one person has ever made Vernon Boyd laugh: Erica Reyes.

Stiles sits next to Derek, their shoulders pressed together. Derek wears the pants he borrowed from a random passerby.

“Did you get that guy’s name?” Stiles asks.

“Why?” Derek asks.

“I’m gonna get Danny to call him up and offer him Armani pants. A huge gift card. I don’t know, something. He did just walk home in his Captain America underpants.”

Derek’s shoulders shake, and it takes Stiles a moment to register that Derek is silently laughing.

 

* * *

 

 Stiles sits at the edge of the practice mat, watching Derek move through fighting forms. Derek’s bare arms and neck glisten with sweat. Stiles is mesmerized.

“Hey, wanna go for a round or two?” Stiles asks.

“Really, now?” Derek says, raising his eyebrows. He moves from a roundhouse kick to an upper cut.

“What, I don’t look like I’d be a good fight?” Stiles says.

“You don’t look like you can fight, period.”

“Oh, ouch,” Stiles says, miming fainting. “Way harsh.”

Derek stops. He yanks off his boxing gloves and tosses them to the wall. He sits down in front of Stiles, resting taped-up knuckles on Stiles’ thighs. “Maybe some other time,” he says. “Call me back when you don’t look like a three-year-old could take you out.”

“Sounds great, square deal,” Stiles says. His ribs still hurt. He doesn’t actually want to fight.

Derek’s hands are still on his thighs.

“You have great eyes, you know?” Stiles says.

“What?”

“Oh my god,” Stiles says, and he kisses Derek because he doesn’t know how else to stop blurting stupid things.

Derek falls back to the mat with a thump, but he keeps right on kissing back while Stiles is on top of him. Derek’s stubble scratches a bit, but in a nice way. Stiles slides his hands under Derek’s shirt and finds the hot skin and firm muscles underneath.

After a while, Stiles pulls back for air. He looks down at Derek, takes in the way that Derek’s eyes have gone dark and his cheekbones hint at a flush. Stiles wonders when his life took a turn for the lucky.

Derek leans up. He presses a kiss against Stiles’ jaw. “Trust me?” he asks, his voice low.

“Yeah, yeah,” Stiles says, because he’s not too articulate when his hands are up Derek’s shirt.

Derek rolls and flips them over, pinning Stiles against the mat. Being manhandled shouldn’t be a turn-on, but Stiles is almost painfully hard. Derek smells warm and musky.

“Off,” Derek says, pulling at the hem of Stiles’ t-shirt.

“Oh, you dirty talker, you,” Stiles says.

It’s so _Derek_ , to look mildly exasperated with one hand down Stiles’ pants. Stiles smirks a bit, but he works at pulling his shirt off anyway.

Derek mouths at the junction of Stiles’ collarbone and neck. Stiles isn’t really using his words any more, he’s just making embarrassing noises and swearing. Derek moves down Stiles’ body, trailing kisses and licks that make Stiles squirm. He brushes the edge of the arc reactor, tracing its outline reverently with his fingertips. Derek moves dangerously low, past Stile’s navel and toward the waistband of his jeans.

“Still trust me?” Derek asks.

Derek phrases it like a rhetorical question, but Stiles knows that it really isn’t. His chest clenches with something between sadness and enormous affection. “You know I do.”

In one smooth movement, Derek peels Stiles’ zipper back, pushes his boxers down, and takes Stiles’ dick in his mouth.

“Oh- _god_.” Stiles lurches up, and then lets his head fall back to the mat with a thunk. He doesn’t know of any good words to express how hot and wet and _incredible_ it feels when Derek drags his tongue just so, strong hands holding Stiles shuddering thighs in place. He tangles his fingers in Derek’s hair. He doesn’t mean to be _that_ hair-pulling guy, but he doesn’t know what to do with his hands otherwise. And Derek doesn’t seem to mind.

All too soon, he feels a climax building. “Hey, hey man,” he says to Derek. “Maybe you should-“

And Stiles comes hard. His vision whites out for a second. When he returns to earth, Derek is hovering over him, watching his face.

“Come here, you,” Stiles says, and pulls Derek back down into a sloppy kiss. He slides a hand down Derek’s pants and jerks him off slow and steady, drawing out small noises from Derek in rhythm.

Afterwards, they lie on the training mat, limp and spent. Derek absently rubs at the back of Stiles neck.

“I should probably scrub the security cameras here,” Stiles says into Derek’s shoulder.

“Probably,” Derek agrees.

“Or maybe I should leave it,” Stiles muses. “It would serve Scott right. I haven’t used the table in the library since that thing with him and Allison and Isaac.”

“Sirs,” BEACON announces. “Avengers assistance requested at a situation developing in Koreatown.”

Stiles groans. “Can’t Lydia take care of this one herself?”

“Ms. Martin respectfully requests that you ‘get your tin-can ass here within three minutes, or there will be consequences’.”

Derek smirks.

“Superheroing is a job, right?” he asks Derek, as he reluctantly pulls himself to his feet. His ribs twinge painfully. “We should unionize. Strike for vacation and health benefits.”

“Or we could go to Koreatown,” Derek says.

“Koreatown it is,” Stiles agrees.

They leave together.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're wondering why important characters like Jackson and Peter and Deaton were summarily ignored, it was because I'm hoping that they'll be featured in an eventual sequel (depending on the response to this, I guess).
> 
> If you wanna talk more in-depth, talk about fandom stuff, personal stuff, or you just wanna make friends, hit up my ask box at starwarring.tumblr.com yo


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